Tech firms go green as e-waste mounts

Inside Hewlett-Packard Co.’s cavernous recycling plant in the Sacramento suburbs, truckloads of obsolete PCs, servers and printers collected from consumers and businesses nationwide are cracked open by goggled workers who pull out batteries, circuit boards and other potentially hazardous components.

The electronic carcasses are fed into a massive machine that noisily shreds them into tiny pieces and mechanically sorts the fragments into piles of steel, aluminum, plastic and precious metals. Those scraps are sent to smelting plants, mostly in the Sacramento area, where they are melted down for reuse.

The computer industry is ramping up its campaign against electronic waste, a dangerous byproduct of technology’s relentless expansion.